Generation Y's Declining Mobility

The declining physical and economic mobility of Americans is a reoccurring theme in the news these days.

Over the weekend neo-liberal economist Todd Buchholtz and his wife, Victoria, published a short editorial in the New York Times entitled "The Go-nowhere Generation," in which they were seemingly perplexed by the particularly sharp decline in mobility for Americans under 30. Instead of contemplating this trend within the context of a declining middle class, skyrocketing debt and the worst job prospects since the 1930's, Buchholtz attempts to explain immobility as a consequence of Generation Y's passivity. I won't bother to belabor the silliness of their mostly anecdotal evidence (Derek Thompson has already countered with a short article in the Atlantic: "Generation Stuck: Why don't young people move, anymore"). Let me just say that Buchholtz makes the classic mistake of perceiving a symptom as the problem's root cause.

Generation Y isn't progressing because it is disillusioned - it is disillusioned because it doesn't have much of an opportunity to progress.

I find it fascinating how blind we have become to the paradigm shift that we're experiencing in our nation and culture. Economists are especially blind. We are, without a doubt, living in an era of changing, and some would say diminished, expectations. Generation Y is coming of age at a time of far greater disparity in wealth and opportunity than its parents. In these hyper-competitive times greater rewards are going to a diminishing minority of the global, hyper-mobile elite.

If we are more pessimistic than our parents about meritocracy and mobility it might be because we're starting to wake-up from the out-dated assumptions of American Dreams